


Midnight Cleanse

by ETNMystic



Series: Mystic's Original Works (Possibly Transferred From My Other Accounts On Other Writing Sites) [27]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abuse, Gen, I'm rating it as Mature just in case, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Hospital, Psychological Horror, Rape Culture, Suicide, like EXTREMELY dark, oh yeah, possible implications of PTSD?, religious implication, this is dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24096340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ETNMystic/pseuds/ETNMystic
Summary: (My first Intro to Creative Writing professor, the one who I wrote the poem "The Glare" about, claimed that no one could tell an exciting story about someone in a bathtub. So I thought "Challenge accepted," and I wrote this for an assignment.)Guilt comes back to haunt an old man in a mental hospital.
Series: Mystic's Original Works (Possibly Transferred From My Other Accounts On Other Writing Sites) [27]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726699
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Midnight Cleanse

The hospital clock struck eleven as Mr. Mortrain pushed himself up on the edge of the tub, keeping a lookout for the orderlies he had to sneak past to be by himself. His tired hands trembled as his weight shifted to pull him into the metallic boat. Rita had warned him against this, reminding him of his chronic arthritis and that he needed her help to get inside of the tub. That was before it happened.

Mr. Mortrain tried to shake it away as his foot slowly submerged into the tepid tub water. Rita was gone from his life now and the doctors encouraged him to keep it that way. Too much focus on her made his condition worse, but he couldn’t help but wonder what he could’ve done differently.

As he fully submerged himself into the water, waiting to adjust to the temperature, he remembered the days Rita would bathe him when his muscles became too stiff. He could still hear her running the water in that old bathtub and the scratch of the needle on the Victrola as Maggie put on his favorite Glenn Miller record as he sat in his bed, waiting to be helped to the tub. He could recall the pitter-patter of Maggie’s little feet as she came into his bedroom wearing her favorite white nightgown, which stood out against her smooth ebony skin, but blended with her kind and gentle demeanor.

“Mother’s got the bath ready,” she would say with a kind smile.

Then she would skip to his side like the fairy folk they read about in the books she owned.

Maggie would always wait for Rita to help him up from his bed. Sometimes it would take a quarter of the hour to get him in the tub, by which time the record would be finished and Maggie would glide over to start it from the beginning.

But as he sat in the hospital tub that night, there was no sound of Glenn Miller’s _Moonlight Sonata_. There was no pitter-patter of innocent feet. There was only the ticking of the bathroom clock and the occasional drop from the faucet. He looked at his hands, dirtied with splotches of black ink from writing; writing in his journal, writing to Rita and Maggie, writing to a lawyer he knew would not process his case to be freed from the hospital.

His hands, once smooth and pale, were also now dark and wrinkled, littered with liver spots. Many people mourned the loss of his white hands; white as the nightgown, white as the soap bar he grabbed from the side of the tub. White as Rita’s face when she came back from visiting Maggie’s father one night.

Maggie claimed she’d been asleep when Rita came back, but something inside nagged at him that Maggie overheard them. Since that night, Maggie became mute, speaking only when critical. She helped less with the baths and her demeanor became timid and anxious. Her white nightgown slowly turned dirtied and tattered. Rita, too, had become tense after that night.

“Get it away,” he gasped hoarsely.  
“Let it be suppressed.”

He scrubbed at his hands and arms with the soap in an attempt to wash off the ink. After about 5 minutes, he glanced down; not a single splotch had faded, yet the bar was covered in ink.

“Perhaps it’s not wet enough,” he rationalized as he dunked the soap into the water.

He tried several more times, but to no avail, just as Rita’s attempts at finding counseling for herself and Maggie. Everyone said she’d asked for it; of course the sleeveless dress would make him lose control. The counselors were of no help either. Rita would come back from a full-on search of a counselor who wouldn’t accuse her of “asking for it,” crying and growling at them and Maggie’s father.

“Everyone keeps defending him,” he remembered her venting after one particularly exhausting search.  
“Do you know how many people have tried to direct me to a church in an attempt to ‘save my soul’? It should be him going through hell, not me! God, if only that bastard would confess or drop dead.”

A sting of pain brought him from his thoughts. He looked at his hands and arms, still splotched, but now raw and bleeding too.

“Must’ve scrubbed too hard,” he figured.

He placed his hands into the water to clean the blood as a new pain came over him. Days after the event, Rita began getting death threats from “friends,” neighbors, counselors, even her mother-in-law, calling her a slut, a whore, told her to go back to hell. It pained him to see her in such agony.

Maggie wasn’t doing much better either. She wouldn’t come from her room except to grab food, go to the bathroom, and go to school. On top of it, she barely spoke at all. One afternoon, he caught her as she came back from school. She had her face looking straight at the floor.

“Maggie, is something wrong?” he asked her as he kneeled in front of her way.

She shook her head as she tried to go around him. He stepped in front of her again.

“Why is your face to the floor? Bring your face up please.”

She did, but immediately put her hands in front of it.

“Maggie, please let me see your face.”

She shook her head.

“Maggie.”

“No,” she squeaked.

“Maggie!” he snapped as he ripped her hands away and gasped at what he saw.

Her eyes had aged years, but still held the youthful doe-like stare, except this doe had gone through hell. All around her face were bruises of all shapes and sizes, ranging from fresh to a few weeks old.

“Who…. did this to you?” he choked out in a mixture of anger and horror.

“The boys say I belong in hell,” she whimpered as she ran past him into parlor.

She was too fast and he was too shocked. He couldn’t move, not until he heard the shot.

“Shit!” he exclaimed as the bar of soap hit an open wound.

He looked down at the water; it was now a dark shade of red, but he didn’t feel drained of blood, nor did he look it. In fact, due to the ink splotches and blood, his skin was only getting darker, even darker than when Rita had returned that night.

“Hey,” she sighed when she saw him sitting in the living room.  
“What’s wrong? Why do you look so grim?”

In his prolonged state of trauma and shock, he could only get out

“Maggie.”

Rita’s skin drained completely of color. Her hands began to shake, dropping the black handbag she carried with her since that night.

“Where is Maggie?” she choked.

His bony finger could barely lift to point at the parlor. He braced himself for the scream as Rita looked inside, but he heard nothing. Not until he heard the rush of footsteps up the stairs.

It was always that moment, from that afternoon to that midnight, that made him wonder what he could’ve done differently. He assumed Rita just needed to process the scene. Instead she needed to find some rope; black rope.

Black as the water in the tub seemed to be turning.

“What the hell is going on?” he gasped, just as Maggie’s father had gasped when Mr. Mortrain had arrived at his house.

There was no reply. Now he wanted the memory to stop. It was always the part he tried to block out or to justify. But this time his mind lingered on the carnage and blood as he had carved out the bastard’s abdomen. Blood began to cover the man as he screamed for mercy, just as the black water seemed to be covering him now.

“No, I’m innocent,” he gasped as the black liquid creeped up his arms.

He felt his neck begin to close, just as it had when Maggie’s father had used the last of his strength to grab his neck and hiss

“I will see to it that you too are punished.”

He had pleaded both self-defense and insanity at the trial, but now he pleaded mercy as the blackness reached his neck.

Every sound seemed to be taunting him now. The ticking clock turned into the gnashing of demon jaws. The dripping from the faucet became the banging of gavels. The rippling water transformed into the voices of a thousand sinners hissing “Guilty” and “Confess” directly into his ears.

The dark leech liquid began pulling him inwards. As he reached the surface, his face turned upward to see two familiar figures wearing white robes, halos, and wings.

“Maggie, please,” he begged to the smaller of the two.

She did not reply. He turned to Rita.

“I did it to avenge you,” he screamed.  
“Rita, my lovely child. Please!”

Rita simply stood there and gave an unsettlingly gentle smile, but her tone did not match.

“I am no sinner’s child.”

She and Maggie turned and flew away as Mr. Mortrain cried for mercy. He heard the satisfied, demonic cackle of Maggie’s father as he was dragged past the surface and silenced, leaving nothing but a tub of sin.

The hospital clock struck midnight.

**Author's Note:**

> I have an example of just how bad this professor was.
> 
> You know the line "Her white nightgown slowly turned dirtied and tattered." ? In the context, that seems pretty clear evidence of symbolism: white is associated with innocence, so it becoming dirtied and tattered represents the loss of innocence. 
> 
> Pretty simple, right?
> 
> Not to her, apparently.
> 
> She commented on this line and I remember the exact wording of her comment from THREE YEARS AGO.
> 
> She wrote: "People don't wash their clothes anymore?"
> 
> THIS WOMAN HAS A DEGREE IN ENGLISH. 
> 
> SHE'S BEEN PUBLISHED. 
> 
> YOU'D THINK SHE'D UNDERSTAND SOME FUCKING SYMBOLISM, RIGHT?!
> 
> APPARENTLY NOT!


End file.
